


By the Lake

by indevan



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loghain questions why the Warden chose to spare him and figures that asking him while he's bathing is the perfect opportunity for this conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Lake

He walks to where the Warden is bathing at the lake.  He doesn’t bathe like a Fereldan, Loghain notices.  He is careful in washing himself and delicate as he rubs the cloth over his skin.  He isn’t Fereldan, he remembers.  He’s a Free Marcher originally.  Dragged to the Circle here when he was a babe.  He looks it.  He’s delicate-looking, that Amell.  Thin wrists.  Narrow hips.  Drooped shoulders.  He stands with his knees drawn in and his hips at a sway.  Even now as he’s standing and rinsing himself, his knees are almost touching.

Loghain doesn’t know why he’s watching him.  His taste in men usually runs broader...blonder.  His own age.  Amell is narrow and thin--yet he bested him in combat.  He didn’t even use his blasted magic.  Just that curved sword he keeps with him.  He is also not even half past eighteen.  A bigger embarrassment; a mage-boy untrained with a sword besting him in a duel.  Shameful.

“What do you want, Loghain?” he asks, not turning round.

He’s surprised.  Wonders if it’s a Warden thing--to sense another.

“How did you--?”

Amell turns to face him and shrugs.

“Everyone else knows that I don’t like being watched while I bathe.”

“Why is that?”

He furrows his brow and says, “Uh, embarrassment?”

His voice catches and he wades ashore to get the towel he’s laid out for himself.  Loghain looks away as he towels himself off and changes back into his clothes.  Layers upon layers.  It’s barely even winter anymore.  Amell fastens a belt around his waist and turns to face him.  He turns his hands out, palm up, as if to show that he’s welcoming him.  To Loghain, it’s a warning.  He’s seen electricity, fire, and ice flow from those hands with wicked efficiency.  That scares him about mages.  They are never unarmed.

“Why did you want to talk to me?”

Amell’s eyes are bright in the darkness and he can see the white crescent of his smile.  Loghain knows not if it’s a true smile or one he’s wearing for politeness.  One of his canines is overly long but not long enough to hang over his lip when his mouth is closed.  He focuses on it, not wanting to meet the boy’s gaze.

“Why did you spare me?”

He turns his palms down.

“You know that mage you hired to poison the Arl?”

He is not sure what that has to do with anything but, yes, he remembers the mage.  Skin and bones and tangled hair.  Patchy stubble.  Fear etched into a face that was far too boyish to belong to a maleficar.

“Yes.”

“His name was Jowan, you know.  He was my best mate back at the Tower.” Amell’s accent is strange.  It’s not Fereldan though he’s spent more time there than back in whatever Marcher city he hails from.  It still sounds it, though.  Not the Starkhaven brogue--lighter.  More delicate.  Kirkwall, maybe. “When I found him in Arl Eamon’s dungeon, I set him free.  I gave him a second chance, later, when I ran into him on the road.”

“Because you were friends?” Loghain raises his eyebrows.  He wonders what this has to do with his own sparing.

“Are,” he corrects. “Because we’re friends and because I believe in second chances.  Even for you.”

He lowers his hands and puts them on his hips.  That smile again.  With the crooked tooth.

“But if I knew it’d mean losing Alistair, I’d have reconsidered.”

His voice catches again, this time in sadness.  It’s as though he can’t stand the thought of someone disliking him.

“We’d been through so much, I’d thought...” He lowers his head, forgetting Loghain is there. “But I don’t blame him.”

He feels a smirk quirk up on his face and says, “Thank you for the vote of confidence, boy.”

Amell’s head snaps up and his eyes look dangerous suddenly and, yes, this is why he doesn’t like mages.  He can almost feel the power thrumming under his skin.  Tingling at his fingertips.

“I’m the senior Warden here,” he says, suddenly authoritative and commanding. “You will not refer to me as ‘boy.’”

“Then how should I refer to you?” he asks dryly.

His face falters and the facade falls.  He nibbles on the side of his lip.

“Uh...Tobias is alright.”

Loghain studies his face again.  The moon is bright tonight--bright enough to illuminate Amell’s face.  He can see the shine of scar tissue near his temple.  Old.  A childhood injury, maybe.  He sees the downturned curve of his mouth and the way his ears come to a slight point.  He’s never noticed these intricacies about him before.  At the Landsmeet, he saw an Orlesian tool--and a foreigner at that.  At Ostagar, he saw a shaking boy hiding behind a curtain of hair.

Amell is not his type in men.  Alistair might have been had he not been poisoned by Duncan’s way of thinking or looked so obviously like Maric.  Painfully like Maric.  Even the way he wore his anger: obvious and open.  Of course, Alistair is not the one standing before him.  Alistair stormed off in a huff.  Amell said he couldn’t blame him and Loghain knows that he does not accept him and will not accept him.  His words are clear: he’s given him a second chance but he does not forgive him.  Maybe he’s reading more into it than there is.

“I don’t forgive you.”

Loghain’s eyes narrow.

“I thought only blood mages could read minds.”

He smiles dangerously. “Who’s to say that I’m not one?”

His eyes rove over Amell’s face to see if he is lying or joking.  His face betrays nothing.

“Are you?” he asks bluntly.

“No.  Blood makes me queasy--Maker’s got a sense of humor, though, making me a spirit healer and a Warden,” he laughs. “Or Duncan and family blood anyhow.”

His laugh is almost harsh like salt on a wound but warm as well.  Loghain stares at the boy again.  He is a bundle of contradictions, this Amell.

“What do you know about me?” he asks, tipping his head to the side.

Moonlight glints off of his still-damp hair: shiny and dark as ink.

“What do you mean?” Loghain turns his gaze away, sniffing.

“You haven’t asked a thing about me.  Oh, I hear it’s ‘your way’ but you’re curious.  I can tell.  But in a way that seems like...you already know a bit.  Not all.  So...what did you find out about me?”

He’s bright.  Too bright.  He looks at him in a bemused way and Loghain is reminded suddenly of Rowan.  She had that gaze, usually reserved for Maric.  His stomach clenches.

“Knowing your enemy is the key to any victory,” he responds, ignoring it. “So, yes, I looked into your past.”

Amell holds his hands out again to prompt him to continue.

“You come from the Free Marches but exactly where I could not find.  You are a mage, though that I already knew.  That is all--apparently the Circle does not keep records.”

“No, just vials of blood,” he agrees with a rueful smile.

Loghain curls his lip a little, though he isn’t really sure what he means.  Much of the Circle is a mystery to him and he’d like it to stay that way.  The last time he had even been there had been to bail Maric out of the trouble he had found himself in with the Wardens.

“And what else is there?”

Amell shifts his weight to the other hip and it rises higher than the other.  He folds his arms over his chest but not before rubbing his nose.  The action causes moonlight to catch the hammered silver of the ring pierced into the flesh of his nostril.

“I am from the Free Marches, yes.  Kirkwall, actually.  You might’ve heard of my family, the Amells, or you might not have.”

Loghain knows them.  Knew them.  A noble family in Kirkwall.  Too many dealings with Orlesians for his tastes, truthfully.  Magic-cursed, too.  Every child born to them was a mage.  Loghain had heard nobles talking about them.  The Amells were a cautionary tale at best and a liability at worst.  A whole family of mages.  Thank the Maker they’ve all been scattered to different Circles.  Perhaps he should be surprised that he is one of those Amells but somehow he is not.

“And?”

He shrugs and momentarily looks nervous. “Not sure.  Uh, I’m allergic to apples and I like to read.  I don’t like the cold.”

To Loghain, only two words register.  Not sure.  The boy is unaware of his own history.  His own life.  He is making history and he doesn’t even know it.

“Hmph,” he says instead, “so all I had to do to kill one of the last remaining Wardens in Ferelden is give him an apple?”

Amell laughs again and this time the sound is warmer, less harsh.

“I’m not deathly allergic,” he says, “or else I wouldn’t be standing here, eh?  How do you think I found out I was allergic to apples?”

It is a fair point and one Loghain has to give him.

“Most you would do is make me break out in hives.” Amell raises a hand and it begins to glow blue. “Hives I can heal.”

Loghain recoils from the magic reflexively even though it is healing magic and not any of his dangerous spells.

“Calm down,” he says.  The magic flickers on his hand and then dissipates.

Amell smiles at him again and lowers his hand once again fold his arms over his chest.  Loghain looks at him curiously.  He does not understand him better and still does not quite understand why he spared him.  He is a confusing, contradictory boy and one who is not his type.  Yet, he cannot stop staring.  Cannot stop wanting to figure him out.  Their time is limited--the Blight is in his end days, he can feel it in his bones--but he wants to take that time to get to know Amell.  No, not Amell.  Tobias, he’d said.

“Walk back to camp with me?” he asks, tipping his head to the side again.

He gathers up the towels he’d brought in his arms and looks at Loghain with a keen eye.

“Well?”

He doesn’t answer him.  Simply moves forward along in stride.  He still does not know why Amell--Tobias, he repeats to himself--spared him but he thinks what matters more now is not that.  What matters more now is finding out everything he can about Tobias Amell.


End file.
